...aah yes, but remember that Karen Blixen was Danish, and the action took place much further North

Some of the problems with Sowf Effrikan Inglush is the fact that the Black languages (and there are 11 official languages in Sowf Effrika) have very different vowel sounds, that don't "translate" well to English. "Parking" becomes "Packing", and "work" becomes "wek".

There was a book published in the '60s that offered a guide to the pronounciation of Sowf Effrikan Inglush; it became the sole source of reference by the BBC at the time! The funny thing was that the book was written with tongue firmly in cheek!

There was a similar book published in Orstralia in 1965 called ‘Let stalk strine’ by Afferbeck Lauder [say it aloud!] which provided some useful definitions (for stewnce, vistas and New Strines) of phrases such as ‘Gloria Soame’, ‘egg nishner’, ‘tea natures’, ‘sex’; explained such questions as ‘Where cheque etcher londger ray?’; and told the true story of Snow White and the Severed Wharves.

Jumping to this hemisphere--I went to school with a guy from our smallest state.If asked where he was from, he'd say, "Rho D'island".He did not speak Kentuckian at all well. The poor thinghad never even eaten cornbread, and thought okra was aJapanese vegetable!

This is a worry! From the subtext I assume that okra is something that one eats. I though that it was used to make rope. Indeed, I even looked it up (!) (Shorter OED) and was no further enlightened, although it did say that one could thicken soup with it.

Okra, as I may have said before, is also called 'ladies' fingers' in India. Bindi, or bhindi, is a close transcription of the word in Hindi (wish I had a Devenagari font to show you how it is spelled in that language).

cheer

the sunshine warrior

ps. Bhindi and karela (from the Kipling/nilghai thread) are amongst my least favorite vegetables, along with, as I said, eggplant/aubergine.

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